Film Review: Death on the Nile

If you’ve ever been to the movies by yourself, you know it’s an…interesting ordeal. There’s no one to loud-whisper with throughout the entire show, and there’s no one to update you on what happened when you come back from the bathroom or from buying the biggest bucket of popcorn available. 

I recently experienced this for the first time, when I went to watch “Death on the Nile.” As a history major and vintage fashion aficionada, I’m a huge fan of films set in the past. Kenneth Branagh’s interpretation provided a new and more nuanced take on Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel of the same name. The storyline follows the murder of the beautiful and extremely wealthy Linnett Ridgeway, who was murdered on a cruise ship where the only other passengers are the invited members of her wedding party. 

The score was grand, sweeping, and elaborate. Paired with the wistful, swinging jazz tunes, this made the movie grandesque, an image both of the American jazz age, and of colonial splendor. Likewise, the movie’s aesthetics show the confident grandeur of the late 20s and early 30s. In the film, we can see how the elite of the era valued spectacle, something Branagh did not skimp on the production. 

In some respects, the film’s cast and their various relation to each other deviated from Christie’s original novel. For instance, the character Salome Otterbourne (who in the novel is an author modeled after the real-life novelist Elinor Glyn) is a Black jazz singer in the film. She exemplifies the affluence and status held by major entertainers and artists of color during the Harlem Renaissance. Another character, Bouc, is in a relationship with Otterbourne’s niece. Additionally, the characters of Marie Van Schuyler and Mrs. Bowers, employer and employee, respectively, are also lovers (in the novel their relationship is only professional). 

In spite of this diversity, however, the wealthy, primarily European characters’ Orientalizing fetishization of Egyptian ruins and ancient civilization was also prominent. Egyptian people were practically non-existent in the film, serving only as rural backdrop and local attraction for the passengers of the S.S. Karnak (the luxury barge on which most of the plot, and all of the murders, took place).

But yet, I am led to believe that this erasure of Egyptian people is intentional, and makes a historical statement in this film. For people like the wealthy passengers of the S.S. Karnak, the “natives” really didn’t exist. Egypt was an archeological and historical artifact, a marvel of the ancient world, not a real, contemporary nation with real, contemporary citizens. We are placed among the main characters; we too are among Linnett Ridgeway’s exclusive entourage cruising down the Nile River in the summer. 

Branagh’s film does an excellent job of portraying a normative, colonial Western society, while also pulling back the curtain on the repressed, peripheral identities that existed during this time.